Mobile homes, an overlooked refuge of affordability, are disappearing in L.A. Residents fight to stay.

The small patch of dirt encircling Carmen Silverio Guardado’s home bears fruit — lots of it. There are pomegranates, guavas, dragon fruit and nectarines. She also grows oregano and lemongrass, with which she brews into a tea to soothe stomach issues.

All of this Silverio Guardado and her husband cultivate beside the two-bedroom mobile home they have owned for 12 years.

They have no plans to move — mostly because they could not afford to live anywhere else.

Mobile homes are the cheapest form of housing in California. On average, owners spend about $1,200 a month on housing, hundreds of dollars less than apartment renters and traditional homeowners, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

But in a housing crisis where the working solution is to build, build, build, some of the area’s least expensive housing has been steadily dismantled over the decades. Since 1986, according to data from the state housing department, Los Angeles County has lost roughly 200 mobile home parks, or one-fourth of its stock.

In some more urban parts of the county, that decline has been even more pronounced. Santa Monica, for instance, which once boasted 11 mobile home parks, has only two.

Despite state and local policies aimed at making it harder to redevelop these parks, sky-high housing prices have put huge pressure on park owners to sell.

“It is the best naturally occurring affordable housing that there is,” said Stephanie Hawke, associate research director of land use and supply at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. “[But] the placement of new parks is nearly impossible.”

Mobile homes in California house some of the lowest-income residents and some of the oldest, many of whom live on fixed incomes.

At Flamingo Gardens Trailer Park in Carson, Silverio Guardado and her husband, Mariano Silverio Mendoza, pay roughly $430 a month to rent the land beneath their home. That represents about 40% of what they receive monthly in Social Security benefits.

When asked if this was workable, they both laughed. “Más o menos,” they said.

While mobile home owners hold the title to their house, they don’t own the land beneath it and pay a monthly fee to rent it from a park owner. This creates a system, experts say, where mobile home owners may be forced to move when a park is sold, either leaving the home behind or paying thousands to move it to another park — that is, if they can find an empty space in the shrinking market.

“[Mobile home parks] exist in this kind of liminal space,” Hawke said. “We don’t put traditional stick-built homeowners in this same kind of precarious situation.”

In urban areas in particular, land costs have become so high that it simply doesn’t make financial sense to run a mobile home park.

“[Park owners] want to develop something that can make more money for them,” said Maria Aguilar, a mobile home owner in Pico Rivera and a volunteer with the Golden State Manufactured-Home Owners League, a statewide organization that lobbies for policies to protect mobile home owners. “Maybe apartments or condos.”

A tale of two cities: Carson

If you want to live in a mobile home park, look to Carson.

The city is home to just under 100,000 people and boasts one of the highest concentrations of mobile home parks in the region. About 8% of the city’s occupied houses are mobile homes, compared to 1.5% in all of Los Angeles County.

Some of the parks in Carson have been around since the 1970s, a decade that marked something of a golden age of mobile home production, when manufacturers across the country were churning them out at a historic rate.

Builders were meeting a demand that had been on the rise since the Great Depression.

In the 1950s the federal government began offering loans to fund the opening of mobile home parks, just as manufacturers began building wider, more spacious homes, according to Esther Sullivan, the author of “Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place.” In 1970, President Nixon recognized mobile homes as an important housing option for middle-income families, calling it “the only kind of housing they can reasonably afford.”

In 1979, the young city of Carson adopted rent control for its parks, which would lead to some of the cheapest rents in the county, but also put more pressure on landlords to sell.

Residents interviewed by the Times said they pay anywhere from $400 to $700 a month in land rent, compared to $1,500 a month in nearby cities.

That includes Glenn White who, now in his 70s, has lived in a double-wide trailer at Park Avalon Mobile Home Park for nearly 30 years.

White paid $28,000 for his home in the late 1990s, a fraction of what the homes cost now.

With the house paid off in full, White said he currently pays about $600 a month in rent — in a county where the median monthly housing cost tops $2,000.

“I kiss the ground every day,” White said.

But with less profits to be made from them, mobile home parks in the city have closed at a faster rate than in the state. Since 1980, the number of parks has fallen from 36 to 20.

Danny Fernandez and his brother help their aging parents with the day-to-day operations of Flamingo Gardens. He said over the years he and his parents have received offers to buy the park. But despite some “incredible” offers, they haven’t budged.

“We don’t plan to go anywhere,” Fernandez said.

It’s a different story around the corner, where residents of Imperial Avalon Mobile Estates got word in 2019 that their park would be sold, razed and developed into apartments and shops.

Jeff Steiman, one of about 300 mobile home owners at the park, said he and others spent years fighting the city and the developer, trying to get payouts to match what their homes were worth. Residents, he said, were elderly, had health issues and often lived in mobile homes so old that moving them was not an option.

Faced with having to relocate, residents worried about finding comparably cheap housing. Four people interviewed by The Times said that at least one resident died by suicide, tormented by the prospect of losing his home.

“This is why buying a mobile home is dangerous,” Steiman said. “Because it’s still private land.”

In 2023, Carson adopted new rules intended to protect against the redevelopment of mobile home parks. The city now has a special land designation for parks. If an owner wants to build something other than a park, they would need to rezone the land, a process that can be costly and time-consuming.

The story of Bell

Even when the government owns the park, it’s not safe from a sale.

In Bell, nearly 300 residents at two mobile home parks learned last year their parks would be sold and they would need to move.

In 1995, the city of Bell purchased the parks after residents complained of annual large rent hikes. Officials said the city wanted to ensure low-income residents could afford to stay.

“We’re not profit-motivated,” city administrator Robert Rizzo told the L.A. Times. Rizzo was later sentenced to 12 years in state prison for dipping into city coffers to pay employees, including himself, exorbitant salaries.

But now Bell says it can no longer afford to operate the mobile home parks. City officials declined to answer questions and directed The Times to a city-run website.

On the website and in fliers sent to residents, the city says it spends $1.5 million a year to maintain the parks and that taxpayers are effectively subsidizing low land rents.

Yudith Meza spent part of her early adulthood living with her parents in their mobile home in Bell, in one of the parks slated to close. Her parents, who are in their 70s, still live in the home.

Meza, now married with two kids and living nearby, said her parents provide childcare four times a week. She worries what will happen if they’re forced to move farther away in search of housing to match the $800 a month rent they currently pay.

“How do you ask people to move?” Meza said.

While California law requires park owners to provide relocation assistance to mobile home owners when a park closes, it’s often hard to find a comparable option.

Meza said when she learned of the impending closure, she and her parents called around to neighboring mobile home parks. They were quoted upward of $20,000 to move the mobile home and told by parks that they wouldn’t accept homes built more than a decade ago; Meza estimates her parent’s home is more than 50 years old.

Mobile home owners have appealed to elected officials outside the city to put a stop to it. In January, Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn sent a letterto the city urging it to do away with its plans to close the mobile home parks.

But in its public notifications about the closure, Bell appears to be going forward with the closures.